Authors: Declan Kiberd
Already in a lost hub-cap is conceived
The ideal society which will replace our own.
37
But the underlying trajectory is, for all its eloquence, more gloomy, individual and estranged. He is, of course, a poet of Belfast, but often by way of disavowal:
One part of my mind must learn to know its place.
The things that happen in the kitchen houses
And echoing back-streets of this desperate city
Should engage more than my casual interest,
Exact more interest than my casual pity.
38
Mahon's problem is that he never felt that he belonged to a city which he would eventually escape, for as an artist he was destined to take Bohemia rather than Belfast for home:
Perhaps if I'd stayed behind
And lived it bomb
by bomb I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.
39
Yet there is no final evasion of commitment in the gesture: rather a widened embrace which has room for the dead peoples of earlier holocausts. In "A Disused Shed in County Wexford" – perhaps the finest poem written by his generation of Irish artists – the speaker seems to open a door onto those earlier victims imaged now as mushrooms:
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of
Treblinka and Pompeii.
"Save us, save us", they seem to say,
"Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!"
40
If Mahon has turned from his native city to a wider world,
Ciaran Carson has in
Belfast Confetti
brilliantly mapped the European architectonics of Walter Benjamin onto the streets and suburbs of that very place. He renders the sights and smells with a real intensity, as if photographing the scenes of a crime; but the emotion is suffused with a conclusive tenderness that can come only from intimate knowledge:
Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, Nuts, bolts, nails car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire . . .
I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering, All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.
41
As remarkable as the revival in the north has been the recent outpouring of poetry and prose by women writers in the south: if the voices of the northern minority, long repressed, became finally audible, the words of women began to make a similar claim to attention. In an obvious sense, this was a reflection of the re-emergence of the women's movement in the 1970s, following the international success of books like
Germaine Greer's
The Female Eunuch
and
Kate Millett's
Sexual Politics:
but at a deeper level it was a repossession by women of energies which had informed the Irish renaissance only to be denied in the new state, energies which some connected back to Celtic ideals of womanhood. Perhaps predictably then, the two foremost women poets of this period worked in Irish, Máire Mhac an tSaoi and Nuala ní Dhomhnaill. The former was already well established by 1960 as a writer of enviable emotional range, who chronicled the frustrations of women spurned in love by cold-hearted males and who appealed by way of consolation to the image of a self-sufficient Celtic woman.
The most technically gifted versifier of her time, Máire Mhac an tSaoi achieved a richness and density of language which nobody could hope to rival. Blessed with such gifts, she was enabled to translate major and minor texts from English, French and Spanish into beautiful, idiomatic Irish, a superb reversal of the more usual trajectory, but one which served and enriched the language which she had wrought to such a pitch of intensity. The difficulties faced by her generation of female artists were pithily summed up in her lyric parody of holy-picture prayers of Irish womanhood:
Cré na Mná Tí
Coinnibh an teaghlach geal
Agus an chlann fé smacht,
Nigh agus sciúr agus glan,
Cóirigh proinn agus lacht,
Iompaigh tochta, leag brat,
Ach, ax nós Sheicheiriseáide,
Ní mór duit an fhilíocht chomh maith!
42
The Housewife's Credo
Keep the dwelling bright and clean and the children in order; wash and scour and clean; prepare meal and beverage; turn mattress – spread cloth – but, like Scheherazade, you will need to write poetry also.
That contemporary condition was also evident in her admission that the strong woman of Celtic mythology was no longer a feasible model in the age of reified bodies in fashion magazines:
AthDheirdre
"Ní bhearrfad m'ingne",
Adúirt sí siúd
Is do thug cúl don saol
De dheascaibh an aonlae sin –
Lena cré
Ni mhaífinnse,
Ná mo leithéidse, gaol –
Cíoraim mo cheann,
Is cuirim dath fém béal.
43
Another Deirdre
"I shan't cut my nails",
That woman said
And turned her back on life.
In consequence of that one day
– With her clay
I would not claim,
Nor would my sort claim, kindred –
I comb my hair
And put rouge on my lips.
So wrought and complex were Máire Mhac an tSaoi's lyrics that they drew few translators: quite the opposite was the case with her follower in the next generation, Nuala ní Dhomhnaill. She, too, handled Gaelic tradition in a more subversive fashion than did the English-language poets. They, in turn, went to her work and translated it in order to derive from the experience a sense of greater abandon in the presence of
Gaelic material. Her "An Crann" (The Tree) tells of how a fairy-woman, armed with a Black and Decker power-cutter, hacked down a garden tree, and of how the speaker's husband asked whether
she
would like it if he were to do the same to her. She duly reports his response to the returned fairy-woman:
"O", ar sise, "that's very interesting".
Bhí béim ar an
very.
Bhí cling leis an
-ing.
Do labhair sí ana-chiúin.
Bhuel, b'shin mo lá-sa,
Pé ar bith sa tsaol é,
iontaithe bunoscionn.
Thit an tóin as mo bholg
is faoi mar a gheobhainn lascadh cic
nó leacadar sna baotháin
íon taom anbhainne isteach orm
a dhein chomh lag san mé
gurb ar éigin a bhí ardú na méire ionam
as san go ccann trí lá.
Murab ionann is an crann
a dh'fhan ann, slán.
44
Paul Muldoon's version is as unbuttoned as the original:
"O", says she, "that's very interesting".
There was a stress on the "very".
She lingered over the "ing".
She was remarkably calm and collected.
These are the times that are in it, so,
all a bit topsy-turvy.
The bottom falling out of my belly
as if I had got a kick up the arse
or a punch in the kidneys.
A fainting-fit coming over me
that took the legs from under me
and left me so zonked
I could barely lift a finger
till Wednesday.
As for the quince, it was safe and sound
and still somehow holding its ground.
Such a treatment is infinitely more satisfying than Ní Dhomhnaill's programmatic assaults on the Sean-Bhean Bhocht of national tradition, an old woman now grown bourgeois, cantankerous and unstoppable:
is gur ag dul i mínithe is imbréagaí atá gach dream
dá dtagann: gach seanrá a thagann isteach i mo chloigeann,
aon rud ach an tseanbhean bhaoth seo a choimeád socair.
45
or in Ciaran Carson's version:
Folly, I'm saying, gets worse with every generation:
Anything, every old cliché in the book, anything at all
To get this old bitch to shut the fuck up.
These
translations from contemporary Irish are very different from the quieter performances of Kinsella or Heaney – as when
Eiléan ní Chuilleanáin renders "Fear" (Looking at a Man) as a male striptease:
Ba chóir go mórfaí tú
os comhar an tslua,
go mbronnfaí ort
craobh is próca óir,
ba chóir go snoífí tú
id dhealbh marmair
ag seasamh romham
id pheilt is uaireadóir.
46
You're the one they should praise
In public places,
The one should be handed
Trophies and cheques.
You're the model
For the artist's hand,
Standing before me
In your skin and a wristwatch.
Writing in Irish, Ní Dhomhnaill might be forgiven a little piety, a
certain rumination on the question of a double colonialism: but rather than lament the wrongs of woman, she assumes equality, even superiority to men, with an ease which may have its roots in Celtic traditions. Nevertheless, she is well aware of the precarious nature of such an achievement in a language which may well be dead as a community tongue before she herself passes on: and so she likens her hope to an infant child placed in a basket on the waters:
féachaint n'fheadaraís
cá dtabharfadh an sruth é,
féachaint, dála Mhaoise,
an bhfóirfifh iníon Fharóinn?
47
only to have it bounce hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh's daughter.
Ní Dhomhnaill taught her generation that the best way to protect a tradition is to attack and subvert it.
So
in "The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish"
Eavan Boland offers a clear inversion of the fish-into-girl progress of the image in Yeats's "The Song of
Wandering Aengus", while at the same time registering in lines which echo Sylvia Plath just how much strain is involved in any conformity to an image:
It's done:
I turn,
I flab upward
blub-lipped,
hipless
and I am
sexless
shed
of ecstasy,
a pale
swimmer
sequin-skinned,
pealing eggs
screamlessly
in seaweed.
It's what
I set my heart on.
Yet
ruddering
and muscling
in the sunless tons
of new freedoms
still
I feel
a chill pull,
a brightening,
a light, a light
and how
in my loomy cold,
my greens
still
she moons
in me.
48
This is more than a revision of Yeats's lyric, for in it a woman has moved from passivity to self-transformation, from being the object of the poem to becoming its subject. Remaining loyal to the idea of nation, Boland found nevertheless that the fusion of the feminine and the national in previous Irish poetry seemed to simplify both in ways that were unacceptable. Lamenting "the power of nationhood to edit the reality of womanhood", Boland pointed to the fact that the women featured in the work of male Irish poets were "often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status".
49
Though this judgement may overlook the strong, self-willed women who are featured in the poems of Yeats, it is informed by Boland's confession that she wrote her own early work in derived modes, as if she were still the object of it:
Rather than accept the nation as it appeared in Irish poetry, with its queens and muses, I felt the time had come to re-work those images by exploring the emblematic relation between my own feminine experience and a national past.
Hence her renegotiation of the mermaid image, her move "with an almost surreal invisibility, from being within the poem to being its maker".
50
The result, in many of Boland's works, is an updating rather than a repudiation of the idea of the nation: a process which has made her the logical laureate of Mary Robinsons presidency. This, however, has not protected Boland from interrogation by northern critics who believe that the age-old equation of woman and nation should be dismantled altogether: "at least unionism does not appropriate the image of woman", proclaims
Edna Longley, "or hide its aggressions behind our skirts".
51
To characterize Irish nationalism as female is, in her view, to endow it with a mythic pedigree with conveniently "exonerates it from oppressive and aggressive intent".
Edna Longley goes further, arguing that it is not necessarily
always
a good thing when passive versions of women are transformed into active ones – especially if they buttress notions of warrior-womanhood which may prove helpful to the IRA. In her denationalized landscape, there would be no need for Boland to apologize for her early imitations of Elizabethan court lyrics or of English Movement poets of the 1960s. "To what icon is she apologizing?" asks Longley and answers "In fact, it is to Mother Ireland herself".
52
She accuses Boland of a failure to interrogate the notion of nation, with the result that the poet ends up reinstating some of the very clichés which she set out to question.
Edna Longley does not manage to define any ground other than the nation from which a poet might conduct such an enquiry. Boland, for her part, adopts the view that myths are best dismantled from within. So in one of her most quoted lyrics
"Mise Éire", Pearse's refrain "I am Ireland" is rewritten as "I am woman":
. . . who neither
knows nor cares that
a new language
is a kind of scar
and heals after a while
into a passable imitation
of what went before.
53
In seeking to free her own voice as a woman, Boland expanded and enriched the definitions of a nation: and she did this by an expressed solidarity with other forgotten communities, including the voteless, voiceless emigrants. In earlier decades leaders such as de Valera had used great festivals to remind those at home of the diaspora overseas. After the 1960s, this went out of fashion and the nation was defined in increasingly shrunken terms as those living on the island or those living in the twenty-six county statelet. When Mary Robinson was inaugurated as president, one of her first actions was to light a lamp in Aras an Uachtaráin as a reminder that the "greater Ireland overseas" also belonged. The inspiration for that gesture she cited as a poem by Boland:
The Emigrant Irish
Like oil lamps we put them out the back,
of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then